Digital technology dramatically impacts the creation, distribution, sale, marketing, and consumption of copyrighted digital content. Recent developments indicate that producers of digital content are under pressure and have a desire to profit from these new developments and reduce their vulnerability to the risk. The risks are more obvious to content producers than the potential benefits of the new technologies.
Copyright protection systems of the pre-digital age consisted of legal mechanisms to prosecute individuals and groups that ran large-scale illegal reproduction facilities for profit. Since intellectual property pirates in the pre-digital age needed physical assets to reproduce the physical media of the books, music, or video, they were subject to traditional law enforcement techniques. The added complications imposed by distribution of these contraband copies made these pirates even more vulnerable to detection. From the consumer's perspective, the illegal copies produced by these pirates were less interesting because quality suffered and the copies were not always promptly available as legitimate copies.
The digital age introduced new risks because flawless copies are now infinitely reproducible and may be transmitted instantly anywhere in the world. There has been a shift from a paradigm where a large number of individuals made a few copies to one where relatively few individuals can make many copies.
When cassette tapes were first introduced, record companies had similar concerns as demonstrated by the record jackets printed in the early 1980s including the slogan “Home Taping Is Killing Music”. Eventually this lead to cassette tape manufacturers paying mandatory licensing fees to the holder of the property rights to the work.
Content producers are rightfully concerned with this new capacity to cheat them of a fair return on their intellectual property and, therefore, have been reluctant to take advantage of digital commerce opportunities. Yet digital commerce offers the potential to increase earnings while cutting the high overhead costs of production, distribution, warehousing their goods while presenting new business opportunities. It is believed that if content producers were sufficiently confident in their ability to protect their assets in digital form, they would gladly take part in such a system.
Legal and regulatory means exist to protect digital content, however a deterrent is necessary to make the illegal copying and distribution of copyrighted content difficult and traceable. For this reason, the deployment of a trusted end-to-end solution for the management of digital rights is a necessary precursor to digital production, dissemination and consumption of copyrighted content.
Digital Rights Management (DRM) involves the description, layering, analysis, valuation, trading, and monitoring of an owner's property rights to an asset. DRM covers the management of the digital rights to the physical manifestation of a work (e.g., a textbook) or the digital manifestation of a work (e.g., a Web page). DRM also covers the management of an asset whether the asset has a tangible or an intangible value. Current DRM technologies include languages for describing the terms and conditions for an asset, tracking asset usage by enforcing controlled environments or encoded asset manifestations, and closed architectures for the overall management of the digital rights.
The Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) provides the semantics for implementing a DRM architecture in an open or trusted computing environment. ODRL defines a standard vocabulary for expressing the terms and conditions over an asset. ODRL covers a core set of semantics for these purposes including the identification of the property rights to the work and the expression of permissible uses for manifestations of a protected asset. Rights can be specified for a specific asset manifestation or format or could be applied to a range of manifestations of the asset. ODRL does not enforce or mandate any policy for DRM, but provides the mechanisms to express such a policy. ODRL does not, however, assume the existence of mechanisms to achieve a secure architecture. ODRL complements existing rights management standards by providing digital equivalents and supports an expandable range of new services that can be afforded by the digital nature of the assets in the Web environment. In the physical environment, ODRL can be used to enable machine-based processing for DRM. The web site “http://odrl.net” contains electronic ODRL resources including the ODRL Specification Format version 1.0, ODRL Expression Language version 1.0, and ODRL Data Dictionary version 1.0.
The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a standard for exchanging data and metadata electronically. Metadata is data that describes data. For example, the term “author” is metadata that describes the data “William Shakespeare”. XML is an outgrowth of the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) that allows the author of an XML document to separate the logical content of the document from the presentation of the content. An author of an XML document adds metadata to a document as hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) tags in the document. A document type definitions (DTD) file is the mechanism that adds shared content to the XML document. The web site “http://www.w3.org/XML/1999/XML-in-10-points” provides an overview of XML.
Extensible Rights Markup Language (XrML) is an XML conforming language definition that specifies rights, fees, and conditions for using digital content. XrML also describes message integrity and entity authentication rules. XrML supports commerce in digital content such as publishing and selling electronic books, digital movies, digital music, interactive games, and computer software. In addition, XrML supports the specification of access and use controls for secure digital documents in cases where financial exchange is not part of the terms of use. The web site “http://www.xrml.org/faq.asp” provides an overview of XrML.
Digital communications networks can be categorized in terms of their geographic coverage, their transmission media, their protocols, their transmission speeds, the types of equipment that they interconnect, and other criteria. An example of geographic coverage categories includes wide area networks (WANs), metropolitan area networks (MANs), local area networks (LANs), and personal area networks (PANs). An example of transmission media categories includes fixed station wireline networks, mobile wireless networks, and hybrid combinations of fixed station wireline networks communicating through wireless access points with wireless networks. There are many digital wireless, wide area network architectures. Most of them are connected to the public switched telephone network (PSTN) to provide access to wireline telephones and digital computers. A short list includes Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM), IS-136 TDMA-based Digital Advanced Mobile Phone Service (DAMPS), Personal Digital Cellular (PDC), IS-95 CDMA-based cdmaOne System, General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) and broadband wireless systems such as W-CDMA, and Broadband GPRS. For more information on these digital wireless, wide area network architectures, see the book by Yi-Bing Lin, et al. entitled Wireless and Mobile Network Architectures, John Wiley & Sons, 2001.
Wide area networks can include communications satellite links that interconnect nation-wide digital networks located on different continents. Nation-wide digital networks typically include backbone networks, regional distribution hubs, and routers, which interconnect access subnetworks serving local routers, servers, and service providers. The Internet is a familiar example of a wide area network. For more information on the Internet as a wide area network, see the book by Daniel Minoli, et al. entitled Internet Architectures, John Wiley & Sons, 1999.
At the other end of the range for geographic coverage are short-range wireless systems. Short-range wireless systems have a typical range of one hundred meters or less. They often combine with systems wired to the Internet to provide communication over long distances. The category of short-range wireless systems include both a wireless personal area network (PAN) and a wireless local area network (LAN). Both of these networks have the common feature of operating in unlicensed portions of the radio spectrum, usually either in the 2.4 GHz Industrial, Scientific, and Medical (ISM) band or the 5 GHz Unlicensed-National Information Infrastructure (U-NII) band. Wireless personal area networks use low cost, low power wireless devices that have a typical range of ten meters. The best-known example of wireless personal area network technology is the Bluetooth Standard, which operates in the 2.4 GHz ISM band. It provides a peak air link speed of one Mbps and a power consumption low enough for use in personal, portable electronics such as PDAs and mobile phones. Wireless local area networks generally operate at higher peak speeds of from 10 to 100 Mbps and have a longer range, which requires greater power consumption. Wireless local area networks are typically used as wireless links from portable laptop computers to a wired LAN, via an access point (AP). Examples of wireless local area network technology include the IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN Standard and the HIPERLAN Standard, which operates in the 5 GHz U-NII band. For more information on wireless LANs, see the book by Jim Geier entitled Wireless LANs, Macmillan Technical Publishing, 1999.
An ad hoc network is a short range wireless system composed primarily of mobile wireless devices, which associate together for a relatively short time to carry out a common purpose. A temporary network such as this is called a “piconet” in the Bluetooth Standard, an “independent basic service set” (IBSS) in the IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN Standard, a “subnet” in the HIPERLAN Standard, and generally a radio cell or a “micro-cell” in other wireless LAN technologies. Ad hoc networks have the common property of being an arbitrary collection of wireless devices, which are physically close enough to be able to communicate and which are exchanging information on a regular basis. The networks can be constructed quickly and without much planning. Members of the ad hoc network join and leave as they move into and out of the range of each other. Most ad hoc networks operate over unlicensed radio frequencies at speeds of from one to fifty-four Mbps using carrier sense protocols to share the radio spectrum. The distance over which they can communicate ranges from ten meters for Bluetooth piconets to over one hundred meters for wireless LAN micro-cells in an open environment. Ad hoc networks consist primarily of mobile wireless devices, but can also include one or more access points, which are stationary wireless devices operating as a stand-alone server or connected as gateways to other networks.
Bluetooth is a short-range radio network, originally intended as a cable replacement. It can be used to create ad hoc networks of up to eight devices operating together. The Bluetooth Special Interest Group, “Specification Of The Bluetooth System”, Version 1.0B, Volumes 1 and 2, December 1999, describes the principles of Bluetooth device operation and communication protocols. The devices operate in the 2.4 GHz radio band reserved for general use by Industrial, Scientific, and Medical (ISM) applications. Bluetooth devices are designed to find other Bluetooth devices within their ten-meter radio communications range and to discover what services they offer, using a service discovery protocol (SDP). The SDP searching function relies on links being established between the requesting Bluetooth device in a client role and the responding Bluetooth device in a server role. Once a link has been established, it can be used to find out about services in the responding Bluetooth device and how to connect to them.
A connection between two Bluetooth devices is initiated by an inquiring device sending out an inquiry message searching for other devices in its vicinity. Any other Bluetooth device that is listening by means of conducting an inquiry scan, will recognize the inquiry message and respond. The inquiry response is a message packet containing the responding device's Bluetooth Device Address (BD_ADDR). A Bluetooth device address is a unique, 48-bit IEEE address that is electronically engraved into each Bluetooth device.
The inquiring device uses the information provided in the inquiry response packet, to prepare and send a paging message to the responding device. To establish a connection, the inquiring device must enter the page state. In the page state, the inquiring device will transmit initial paging messages to the responding device using the access code and timing information acquired from the inquiry response packet. The responding device must be in the page scan state to allow the inquiring device to connect with it. Once in the page scan state, the responding device will acknowledge the initial paging messages and the inquiring device will send a paging packet that provides the clock timing and access code of the inquiring device to the responding device. The responding device responds with a page acknowledgment packet. This enables the two devices to form a connection and both devices transition into the connection state. The inquiring device that has initiated the connection assumes the role of a master device and the responding device assumes the role of a slave device in a new ad hoc network piconet.
Each piconet has one master device and up to seven slave devices. All communication is directed between the master device and each respective slave device. The master initiates an exchange of data and the slave responds to the master. When two slave devices are to communicate with each other, they must do so through the master device. The master device maintains the piconet's network clock and controls when each slave device can communicate with the master device. Members of the ad hoc network piconet join and leave as they move into and out of the range of the master device. A piconet supports distributed activities, such as collaborative work projects, collaborative games, multi-user gateways to the Internet, and the like. A user's device that joins a particular piconet does so to enable its user to participate in the currently running collaborative activity.
A Bluetooth-enabled laptop computer can send information to a Bluetooth-enabled printer in the next room. A Bluetooth-enabled microwave oven can send a message to a Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone announcing that the meal is ready. Bluetooth will become the standard in mobile phones, PCs, laptops and other electronic devices, enabling users to share information, synchronize data, access the Internet, integrate with LANs or actuate electro-mechanical devices, such as unlocking a car. A passenger can use a laptop or handheld computer to compose an electronic mail message while flying in an airplane and then, after landing, the messages can be automatically forwarded to the Internet by Bluetooth devices that are ubiquitously located around the airport terminal. In another example, while waiting in an airport lounge, the passenger can receive interesting duty-free offers directly on the laptop or handheld computer or play multi-player games with friends.
The IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN Standard defines at least two different physical (PHY) specifications and one common medium access control (MAC) specification. The IEEE 802.11(a) Standard is designed for either the 2.4 GHz ISM band or the 5 GHz U-NII band, and uses orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) to deliver up to 54 Mbps data rates. The IEEE 802.11(b) Standard is designed for the 2.4 GHz ISM band and uses direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) to deliver up to 11 Mbps data rates. The IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN Standard describes two major components, the mobile station and the fixed access point (AP). IEEE 802.11 ad hoc networks have an independent configuration where the mobile stations communicate directly with one another, without support from a fixed access point. The IEEE 802.11 standard provides wireless devices with service inquiry features similar to the Bluetooth inquiry and scanning features. IEEE 802.11 ad hoc networks support distributed activities similar those of a Bluetooth piconet, except that they have ten times the communications range.
In order for an IEEE 802.11 mobile station to communicate with other mobile stations in an ad hoc network, it must first find the stations. The process of finding another station is by inquiring. Active inquiry requires the inquiring station to transmit queries and invoke responses from other wireless stations in an ad hoc network. In an active inquiry, the mobile station will transmit a probe request frame. If there is an ad hoc network on the same channel that matches the service set identity (SSID) in the probe request frame, a station in that ad hoc network will respond by sending a probe response frame to the inquiring station. The probe response includes the information necessary for the inquiring station to access a description of the ad hoc network. The inquiring station will also process any other received probe response and Beacon frames. Once the inquiring station has processed any responses, or has decided there will be no responses, it may change to another channel and repeat the process. At the conclusion of the inquiry, the station has accumulated information about the ad hoc networks in its vicinity. Once a station has performed an inquiry that results in one or more ad hoc network descriptions, the station may choose to join one of the ad hoc networks. The IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN Standard is published in three parts as “IEEE 802.11-1999”, “IEEE 802.11a-1999”, and “IEEE 802.11b-1999”. All three of these publications are available from the IEEE, Inc. web site at http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/802/11.
The HIPERLAN standard provides a wireless LAN with a high data rate of up to 54 Mbps and a medium-range of 50 meters. HIPERLAN wireless LANs provide multimedia distribution with video quality of service (QoS), reserved spectrum, and good in-building propagation. There are two HIPERLAN standards. HIPERLAN Type 1 is a dynamic, priority driven channel access protocol similar to wireless Ethernet. HIPERLAN Type 2 is a reserved channel access protocol similar to a wireless version of asynchronous transfer mode (ATM). Both HIPERLAN Type 1 and HIPERLAN Type 2 use dedicated spectrum at 5 GHz. HIPERLAN Type 1 uses an advanced channel equalizer to deal with intersymbol interference and signal multipath. HIPERLAN Type 2 avoids these interference problems by using orthogonal frequency division multiplex (OFDM) and a frequency transform function. The HIPERLAN Type 2 specification offers options for bit rates of 6, 16, 36, and 54 Mbps. The physical layer adopts an OFDM multiple carrier scheme using 48 carrier frequencies per OFDM symbol. Each carrier may then be modulated using binary phase shift keying (BPSK), quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK), or quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) formats of 16-QAM or 64-QAM to provide different data rates. The modulation schemes chosen for the higher bit rates achieve throughput in the range 30-50 Mbps.
The HIPERLAN Type 1 is a dynamic, priority driven channel access protocol that can form ad hoc networks of wireless devices. HIPERLAN Type 1 ad hoc networks support distributed activities similar those of the Bluetooth piconets and IEEE 802.11 independent basic service sets (IBSS). The HIPERLAN Type 1 standard provides wireless devices with service inquiry features similar to those of the Bluetooth inquiry and scanning features and the IEEE 802.11 probe request and response features. An overview of the HIPERLAN Type 1 principles of operation is provided in the publication “HIPERLAN Type 1 Standard”, ETSI ETS 300 652, WA2 December 1997.
HIPERLAN Type 2 is a reserved channel access protocol that forms ad hoc networks. HIPERLAN Type 2 ad hoc networks support distributed activities similar to those of the HIPERLAN Type 1 ad hoc networks, Bluetooth piconets and IEEE 802.11 independent basic service sets (IBSS). HIPERLAN Type 2 provides high speed radio communication with typical data rates from 6 MHz to 54 Mbps. It connects portable devices with broadband networks that are based on IP, ATM and other technologies. Centralized mode is used to operate HIPERLAN Type 2 as an access network via a fixed access point. In addition a capability for direct link communication is provided. This mode is used to operate HIPERLAN Type 2 as an ad hoc network without relying on a cellular network infrastructure. In this case a central controller (CC), which is dynamically selected among the portable devices, provides the same level of QoS support as the fixed access point. Restricted user mobility is supported within the local service area. Wide area roaming mobility can also be supported. An overview of the HIPERLAN Type 2 principles of operation is provided in the Broadband Radio Access Networks (BRAN), “HIPERLAN Type 2; System Overview”, ETSI TR 101 683 VI.I.1 (2000-02) and a more detailed specification of its ad hoc network architecture is described in “HIPERLAN Type 2, Data Link Control (DLC) Layer; Part 4. Extension for Home Environment”, ETSI TS 101 761-4 V1.2.1 (2000-12).
Other wireless standards support ad hoc networks. Examples include the IEEE 802.15 Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN) standard, the Infrared Data Association (IrDA) standard, the Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications (DECT) standard, the Shared Wireless Access Protocol (SWAP) standard, the Japanese 3rd Generation (3G) wireless standard, and the Multimedia Mobile Access Communication (MMAC) Systems standard of the Japanese Association of Radio Industries and Businesses.
Thus, there is a need for a method, system, and computer program product for integrating digital rights management into a mobile computing environment. The mobile computing environment can include any wireless wide area network such as a cellular network or short range wireless system such as a wireless LAN or a wireless personal area network. The method, system, and computer program product disclosed herein would provide a light-weight and efficient DRM architecture that can promote the growth of electronic commerce in the mobile computing environment.